Charles March

Nature Translated

This exhibition of photographs by Charles March, Nature Translated, demonstrates just how much the photographic universe has changed in the nearly two centuries since the medium was invented. The images also demonstrate how far the medium can be pushed, and how flexible it is in the hands of an inventive practitioner. March has been in love with photography since the age of twelve.

What liberated him to make the series of photographs shown here was the advent of digital photography, which permits a much freer approach than was ever possible previously. Charles March’s photographs of trees are seldom or never meticulously detailed, in a way that we still tend to describe as ‘photographic’. Instead they seem astonishingly free, with the kind of rapidity and sketchiness that we feel is appropriate to drawings — even more so perhaps to the wilder kind of classical Chinese ink-painting. He says, «What I am looking for is the quality in the print and the quality of the structure of the image, and not to be distracted by too much detail. I am not keen on giving too much information — I want the viewer to make some of it up. The idea is to create something that makes people think a bit differently about what they see —something that emotionally involves them».

In making these images, Charles March has turned to sources that existed before photography was invented, not only to Chinese ink-painting, but also to some of Constable’s pencil drawings and the ‘Colour Beginnings’ made by J. M. W. Turner when planning his landscape compositions. A number of the images come from sites very close to where he lives, at Goodwood. In this sense, they can be seen as a celebration of Englishness and of the English Romantic sensibility.

Edward Lucie-Smith